Whoa guys! I read a great book that I want to recommend. It is called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship Of Her Own Making, and you can read the first eight chapters free online here here! I love creators who utilize the internet to get rad weird stuff out there. I wrote a glowing review of it on Goodreads in which I compared it to a fairyland version of something by Douglas Adams, but for webcomic fans I would also like mention that it feels like something Megan Rose Gedris would write/draw? Except slightly more – mmm – mature than either of those. But also more childlike. I thought it was pretty swell, anyway.

NEWS FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: I’ve officially changed the update schedule from “Tuesday and Thursday” to “twice a week” which better reflects my reality and yours. If you’re worried about missing something, I always always post new comics to my twitter and facebook page. There’s also the RSS Feed if you like… being fed!

In other news, I am going to be at Conbust in Northampton, MA again this year! I will be behind a table, selling things! I will also be at TCAF, but only as a guest. But if you still want to meet me, or maybe even buy a zine or button or something, that would be cool! If you want to tell me about or show me and my partnerguy around places in Toronto, that would also be cool.

And we’re back. I’ve officially changed the update schedule from “Tuesday and Thursday” to “twice a week” which better reflects my reality and yours. If you’re worried about missing something, I always always post new comics to my twitter and facebook page. There’s also the RSS Feed if you like… being fed!

In other news, I am going to be at Conbust in Northampton, MA again this year! I will be behind a table, selling things! I will also be at TCAF, but only as a guest. But if you still want to meet me, or maybe even buy a zine or button or something, that would be cool! If you want to tell me about or show me and my partnerguy around places in Toronto, that would also be cool.

Thanks for reading!

So! You might have noticed that there are a lot of U.S. websites blacked out or featuring censor bars today. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a bill called SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate, and a lot of internet folks are coming out against them because, besides being ineffective in fighting piracy, they are a potential threat to free speech on the internet. You can learn more in this video. I’m taking part because, honestly? If someone sent a link of my site to Rupert Murdoch I am SURE he would find at least a dozen visual representations of shit he owns. The bills are designed to stop piracy, but the concern is that they’re worded broadly enough that it’s hard to define what counts as “infringing”, and sites that are found to be infringing can just be cold shut down. I’m not hosting or linking to pirated videos (though if someone in a comment thread did, that’s enough), but what kind of precedence is this setting? Are screenshots a threat to his intellectual property rights? Song covers? Fan works? Links to these things? Even if he’s not in the right to have my site shut down, what the hell kind of fight would I be able to put up?

People are talking a lot about the impact on social networks, but it’s also easy to see how SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act, which is ITSELF an acronym, though I couldn’t tell you for what, but calm down with the acronyms Senate bros) might favor big business and disadvantage independent artists. How many webcomic creators that you know and love have, at some point, drawn a character they don’t own into their comics? How many artists you follow online have drawn inspiration from their favorite television shows, comics or movies? And how many of these creators would have the money or time to put up any kind of legal fight against a company like Disney?

Right now, thanks to pressure from the White House, SOPA has been “shelved”, but PIPA is still moving forward, and it would be great if a big show of opposition could get them both trashed for good. You can sign the petition under the video, or this one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I also found this list of where various congresspeople stand. Contact your representatives and tell them why you’re against these bills and they should be too, or thank them for their public opposition.

Ok! Truly, thanks for reading.

EDIT: It’s unclear to me how extreme the abuse of this thing would have to be for fan works to be considered infringing, so I may have read into the threat here wrong. I don’t want anyone to think I’m misrepresenting the text of the bill, these are just my legitimate concerns for the potential for abuse in the future if we grant corporations this level of power. (But I’m pretty confident that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t understand what the bill means, either, sooo.) Reddit has a good comprehensive post on the specific details of the bill and the threats it currently presents.

This arc is a good time to remember that Wren is very much influenced by Mo of DTWOF: she’s in the wrong and we love her.

Speaking of stuff I love, I have been kind of obsessed with Adam WarRock for a few weeks now. I listen to him when I’m making comics, and when I’m getting ready for work, and one of his songs is stuck in my head pretty much all the time! Tonight I’ve been listening to this mixtape (which isn’t really that nerdy, just great) on repeat.If you like Riot Nrrd, you may want to start with this here track (if you read SUPER #1, it will not be surprising that I started crushing out on the line “I often wonder woman/if they’re feeling your power girl”). He has a lot of free music, but you should also think about buying something from him, because giving money directly to artists is kind of my favorite thing about the internet!

ANYWAY: thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading, everybody.

So! I’m sorry about the weird schedule this week. I was traveling last weekend and it threw me off my sense of what day it is. I think I also want to express something about my New Year’s Resolution, in as much as I have one, which is only kind of? I had a lot of abstract thoughts about it, but it’s not a specific habit, which one might say is setting me up for failure, but I find a shift in thinking tends to be, in the end, more effective than a plan to which I have no motivation to actually stick. I just want to consider myself a cartoonist instead of a person becoming a cartoonist, you know? I want to have the confidence to promote my own work, to leave space for the knowledge that I’m young, I still have a lot of growth to do, someday I will be making better comics – but to insist that the things I make have value. I don’t want to lay guilt on myself about how much better I should be or how tight of a schedule I should stick to to make up for the fact that my art’s not great, because the guilt leads to rushing which leads to low quality comics. Not that I’m going to say fuck-all to my schedule. I plan to make two comics a week. That’s a great pace for me. I’m just trying to say that my priority is to keep making comics in a larger sense. You know? And I have to keep in mind that I need to take care of myself in order to keep making comics.  I don’t know! Emotional self-care, making comics, etc. I could feel differently, like, tomorrow, but, yes. Thank you for reading.

Reminder: Super #1, featuring the first ten of one hundred of my original superheroes experiment, is now available!